The Arkansas Ghost

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The courtroom was packed that December morning in Mountain View, Arkansas. Murder trials always attract big crowds of the curious and the morbid. And this trial had the kind of melodrama going for it that would have been right at home in a copy of True Detective magazine. Five assailants were charged with the crime, an act of fiendish violence.

The details of the crime were lurid. The star witnesses were a teenage girl and a man who could neither hear or speak. And in an extra unexpected twist, the prosecutor and the attorney for the defense were brothers. It was just one week before Christmas in 1929 when that defense attorney, Ben Williamson, found himself questioning the last person anyone expects to take the stand in a murder trial.

The victim. You weren't beaten to death and burned last March, were you? Well, I don't look like it. And I don't feel like it. Stuff. When it was founded in 1873, it was called the Arkansas State Lunatic Asylum. Today it's called the Arkansas State Hospital. There was a brief period in between when it was known as the State Hospital for Nervous Diseases.

And that's where our story begins. The place has, you know, the usual blood-curdling history you find in old institutions for the treatment of mental illness. Meaning, not much treatment at all for the living and a whole lot of unmarked graves for the dead. Thousands of graves, in fact. Record-keeping was spotty at best and despite a lot of official hemming and hawing, it looks pretty likely that Interstate 630 was built over the final resting place of many of the patients who were once warehoused there.

Because surprise, surprise, the place was sorely overcrowded. One census, taken at random in July 1929, found that the hospital was overcapacity by nearly 1,200 patients. The state legislature tried to address the problem that year with a proposal that it would at least, you know, more adequately fund the place. And if that wasn't practical, then the state would build additional facilities.

The money for that was supposed to come from the Hall Income Tax Bill, which the legislature had only just passed. The usual anti-income tax crowd pounced on that though and the whole thing got hung up in the Arkansas State Supreme Court. By that point, the man who'd find himself at the center of a bizarre murder case had already escaped from the state hospital for nervous diseases.

He was a married father of four named Marion Franklin Rogers. When he went over the wall, it wasn't to return to his family life. No, Mr. Rogers bolted in the opposite direction. Haven't a lot of us daydreamed about starting over? It's another thing altogether though to take that daydream and make it real. To walk away from the life you have.

Just start fresh somewhere else. What a seductive idea it is. A whole reset. Except the one thing you have to bring to your new life is the very thing you might be trying hardest to leave behind. Yourself. It was a whole lot easier for a man to disappear back then. Cash was king. There was no internet, no cell phone signal to trace.

A person could simply vanish into a new name and a new identity. You were who you said you were back then. Your word was enough. The world before satellites and GPS was a bigger world. Which meant a person wouldn't really even need to run all that far away from home. The distance from the asylum in Little Rock to Stone County was about a hundred miles.

Plenty far enough in those days for a man to stop looking over his shoulder and try starting over. The Marion Franklin Rogers who bolted from the State Hospital for Nervous Diseases became a drifter. He picked up work where he could find it. He made a good farmhand, was a competent woodcutter. Rogers found himself in the Ozark Mountains in the small, isolated, poor community of St. James.

He shaved a decade off his age. The 32-year-old husband and father was now calling himself Connie Franklin. And the man by any name had an eye for the ladies and was soon involved with a 16-year-old girl named Tiller Ruminer. The courtship moved fast because of course it did. Connie Franklin was an experienced, grown man.

Tiller was a farm girl barely out of childhood. As unworldly as could be, from a first meeting in January 1929 to a promise of marriage in less than three months, it must have seemed like something out of a dime store romance novel to the girl. And then came the night of March 9th, 1929. The night Connie Franklin just up and disappeared.

That was one version of the story anyway. Another version was the one that Tiller Ruminer waited two months to share with the law. The torture, mutilation, and burning alive of Connie Franklin, age 20, a farmhand, and an attack on his woman companion on a lonely mountain road 14 miles east of Mountain View, Arkansas, came to light with the arrest of four men indicted by the county grand jury all on first-degree murder charges.

Now the venerable New York Times got it slightly wrong there. Five men had been arrested. Alex Fulks, Herman Greenway, Hubert Hester, Bill Younger, and Joe White. Greenway and Hester were also charged with statutory crimes against Ms. Ruminer. You want to guess what statutory crimes might mean? The grand jury had been investigating the slaying for months.

Fear of reprisal, which sealed the lips of the woman, even when she was brought before the grand jury, made the work of the jury difficult. Did it happen this way? On the evening of March 9th, 1929, Connie Franklin and his teenage fiancé were tired of waiting. Why shouldn't they be married right now, right away? All they had to do was pay a visit to the home of the Justice of the Peace.

Wasn't a far walk, and the night was pleasant enough. You're my wife in all but name anyhow, Tiller. Can't a man want the world to know what's his? A romantic stroll to the future, bathed in all that Ozark mountain moonlight. It's just too bad that the couple wasn't alone in the woods that March evening. A band of intoxicated night riders who terrorize this community in their determined efforts to prevent the marriage of a mentally deficient youth.

Beg your pardon, but I do take some offense at being characterized as mentally deficient. A mentally deficient youth and a girl of the St. James community was blamed by Sheriff Sam Johnson for the mutilation and burning alive of Connie Franklin, farmhand and prospective bridegroom. It was a band of men accosted us. Liquor on their breath.

The shouting. I told Sheriff Johnson. Well, the girl says she and Franklin were on their way to be married. Now, Franklin was mutilated, she said. And after fainting from the pain, was tossed up on a blazing log fire by the men who, she said, expressed the belief that he was dead. Then, two of those men, inflamed by liquor.

They led that girl into the woods and they attacked her. And it was the fear of those so-called night riders returning that kept Tiller Ruminer quiet. What does that even mean? What exactly is a night rider? Night rider, a shadowy flight into the dangerous world of a man who does not exist. Oh, curse you, David Hasselhoff. Not everything is about you.

A real night rider is very different from the one in the classic NBC TV show. Night riders were vigilantes who carried out attacks on their targets while wearing disguises and or under cover of darkness. In Arkansas, night riders spent the first decade of the 20th century harassing cotton farmers. Armed, masked and on horseback, vigilantes terrorized farmers burning wagons piled high with cotton all to bully the growers into holding out for higher prices for their crops.

They used dynamite to blow up farm equipment. They set barns ablaze and they killed livestock. They pounced on cotton buyers and beat the snot out of them. Now, if you squint your eyes real hard, you can maybe make this look a little bit noble, but not for long. What started off as an attempt to level the playing field for poor farmers by holding the line on cotton prices turned very quickly into mob violence.

Because the problem with vigilante justice is it isn't bound by any rules. The night riders, drunk off a taste of power, turned their vicious attention next to black farm workers. Wages were based on race back then and whites were ticked off to lose jobs to their more poorly paid black neighbors. But instead of revolting against the racial discrimination perpetrated by their employers, they attacked their fellow workers instead.

Which honestly feels about as American as apple pie, doesn't it? Night riders were trouble for law enforcement and not just in Arkansas, but in a lot of places including Kentucky, Tennessee, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri. In 1909, Act 112 was passed by the Arkansas General Assembly outlawing night riding, which obviously didn't end the practice, but it did give police and prosecutors a little something to work with.

And in Arkansas, at least, no one was shy about naming names and publicizing arrests when it came to the night riders. Something that wasn't equally true for people who perpetrated lynchings, which says a whole lot about the collective sentiment of the time. That said, the law against night riding in Arkansas wasn't playing.

The bill was passed without a dissenting vote. It provides penalties of from 1 to 10 years imprisonment for anyone guilty of any sort of connection with night riding operations. Anyone participating in any acts of violence in connection with any night riding wherein any person is injured and dies will be deemed guilty of murder in the first degree and upon conviction will suffer the penalties provided for such crime, death.

And so now here we are, it's 20 years later, and a band of so-called night riders have assaulted and killed a man, set his corpse ablaze, and then dragged 16-year-old Tiller Ruminer into the woods and raped her? If it made it all the way to a trial, it would be a death penalty case. But what if the grisly events of that night happened another way?

What if there was no love-struck couple walking hand-in-hand in the woods that night? What if Connie Franklin was alone? I was on my way to Mountain View to get a marriage license to marry Tiller Ruminer. I was riding a mule, the mule slipped, and I was thrown against a tree. It knocked me unconscious. I don't know how long I lay there, but when I got up, I went to Herman Greenway's house.

Herman Greenway, remember, was one of the alleged night riders indicted for the torture and murder of none other than Connie Franklin. I stayed there all night, and the next day I went to Tiller Ruminer's house. She said now she wanted to wait until fall to get married. I asked her to come into another room. I waited to talk to her, but she said she didn't want to see me.

I left Stone County that day and went to Morrelton, where I work for Mr. Wingo. I didn't know of the murder in Stone County, except in a vague way. They didn't tell me it was me who was killed, and I don't know much about reading newspapers. I want to see Tiller. I don't know whether she still wants to marry me, but I am willing.

Well, this is really quite a story Connie Franklin is telling. Very different from the one Tiller told the sheriff. Not only were there no marauding night riders in Franklin's version of events, he claimed to have been an overnight guest of one of the men accused of throwing his dead body onto a bonfire. Oh yeah, and we also can't overlook the fact that his host, Herman Greenway, was also staring down charges of having sexually assaulted Franklin's fiancee, Tiller Ruminer.

Which, you know, that'd be some powerful southern hospitality right there. But maybe, what if? Is it possible that it happened another way? Several days prior to the murder, some of the men accused that the crime had been out drinking. They came up with what they thought would be a hilarious prank. They'd ask men in the community for their marriage licenses.

Then, with the very official document in hand, they'd trick Connie Franklin and Tiller Ruminer into thinking that the license had been procured on their behalf. The group considered both Franklin and Ruminer to have defective minds, so they'd be easily fooled. Prosecutor Williamson revealed that the accused disclosed their intention to stage a mock wedding for the couple, and then, quote, have a little bit of fun.

When a group of men confess to a drunken plot involving two people they consider mentally defective, and then describe the whole thing as having a little bit of fun, it most definitely won't be fun for everyone involved. That's for damn sure. The five men, according to officers, came upon Franklin and his sweetheart on the night he disappeared.

Franklin's jealousy of a member of the alleged Night Riders is said to have brought forth his threat that he would reveal their activities in moonshining. Franklin was beaten and mutilated, and the girl was attacked. Officers say that Franklin, overcome by the torture, fainted, and the band, believing he was dead, burned the body.

Only a few charred bones in the dismembered and partly charred body of Franklin were found by officers in their search for the youth after his disappearance. He said, she said, they said. But what none of them seemed to know was that there was another witness, another person out that night in the woods, an eyewitness.

His name was Reuben Harrell. He was deaf and mute, but not blind. And his story, told through twitches of his fingers in response to questions, matched only one version of the story of that terrible night. Tiller Ruminers. Connie yelled out, Till, Till, run, they're killing me. Then Joe White slammed a big rock on his head.

I couldn't help him none, because Greenway was dragging me into the bushes. Then Hester came and helped Greenway do what he was doing to me. I went back later and seen Connie laying in the road. He was dead. Reuben Harrell testified in court that he had watched as four of the attackers hefted Franklin's body and carried it toward a roaring fire fed by big logs.

The sheriff was told other vestiges of this human holocaust were thrust into a bag and thrown into a creek. They have not been recovered. It would have been what they call an open and shut case. What with Harrell's eyewitness testimony corroborating Tiller Ruminers. The state had a whole box full of charred bones as evidence.

Slam dunk, right? Except there was that one very thorny problem. The murder victim himself. For starters, he told a different story. And also, he was alive to tell it. Very unusual in any case, and especially in this one, where a man had been beaten, dismembered, and set ablaze. Someone was gravely mistaken or lying. But who? And why?

The press and the public could not get enough of this bizarre and baffling story. Big city reporters descended on the tiny town of Mountain View, Arkansas. They booked rooms at the Dew Drop Inn and then complained about the lack of electricity and running water. A journalist named Harry Brundidge was one of them. The crime beat wasn't Harry's usual thing.

He was more at home in Hollywood interviewing starlets and directors. Not that he was a lightweight. Brundidge had been a war correspondent. He'd boxed with the great Jack Dempsey just for funsies and had taken on more than one racketeer. So the guy had earned his fluffy gig as an entertainment reporter. When his editor shipped him off to Arkansas, Harry did what Harry always did, and he made the best of it.

In the evenings, he'd prowl around the Dew Drop Inn in a pair of orange striped silk pajamas topped with a Japanese kimono. Who in tiny Mountain View had ever seen such a sight before? Kansas City star reporter, Conal Carlson, left his fancy kimono at home, but he brought his bootleg liquor. Prohibition, schmo-hibition, Carlson pounded the hard stuff with such gusto that he ended up charged with public drunkenness and had to flee Mountain View before they busted him a second time.

One of the biggest challenges the press had was getting their stories out to the waiting world. Telephone service was almost non-existent. The nearest telegraph office was eight miles away. It was so remote and difficult that the Associated Press ended up installing a telegraph wire in the courthouse, the very first telegraph wire ever in Mountain View.

And once those newspaper stories did get out, the picture these outsiders painted of this isolated Ozark community wasn't flattering, and the people of Arkansas were indignant. Who were these strangers to make them out to be a horde of violent backwoods hillbillies when anyone with sense knew that the big cities had plenty of crime and violence and murder and bombings and were every bit as fearful a place as little Stone County, Arkansas, could ever hope to be?

It didn't help that each new week seemed to cough up a fresh and confounding detail about the case, like the discovery that there was yet one more eyewitness, one more silent observer that night in the woods, 53-year-old Eugene Chauncey, who said that he'd been too scared to come forward. The night riders threatened to kill him if he dared to speak.

Chauncey told Sheriff Johnson that he was on his way home the night of the killing when he heard a scream and cries of pain. Seeing a group of men moving about in the woods nearby, he took a position behind a tree. It's all considerable. Franklin was begging for mercy, and he begged so hard. Please let me live ten minutes longer to go to Charlie Ruminer's house.

The men only replied, we're going to kill you. I then saw the big man raise a heavy club and bring it down on Franklin's head. He let out a cry, and it was awful weak. And he fell to the ground. Chauncey told Sheriff Johnson that he was standing too far away to recognize any of the men, and then later told the sheriff that he'd been threatened with death by several of the men if he told what he witnessed.

Exactly the kind of statement that the press used to paint a picture of a backwoods crime cartel fueled by bloodshed and threats of blackmail. Preying on the fears of ignorant mountain folk who were too superstitious and too scared of the outside world to push back. Married father of four escapes from asylum. Teenage girl falls for farmhand.

Farmhand disappears. Sheriff gets a box of charred bones. Five men arrested for murder. And then, the murder victim strolls into town. December 17th, 1929. Jury selection began in the trial of the murder of Connie Franklin. Though five men were charged with the crime, only four would stand trial. Alex Fulks was named in a separate indictment.

His connection to the crime being different from the others. Before the first witness would be heard, something unusual happened. The grand jury reconvened simultaneously with the court because they had questions for the man who claimed to be Connie Franklin. The man was interrogated for two hours. This was followed by a physical examination of Franklin.

Something both prosecution and defense agreed to. The goal was to establish once and for all whether or not Connie Franklin was the same man known as Marion Franklin Rogers, escapee from the state hospital for nervous diseases. Dental and medical records were obtained from the hospital. The Connie Franklin presenting himself to the grand jury in Mountain View had teeth that didn't match the record.

This Connie Franklin had a hernia scar on the left side of his body. The medical record showed a hernia scar on the right side of Marion Franklin Rogers' body. Finally, the records indicated that the inmate walked with a pronounced limp. This Connie Franklin didn't. Case dismissed? Not so fast. The Connie Franklin who was reported mutilated and burned to death last March 9th has been definitely identified as the former asylum inmate.

However, the state hospital received a letter from a man signing himself as Marion Connie Franklin from St. James. At the time, Connie Franklin was there. The letter indicated that the writer had been an inmate at the hospital and was described by hospital officials as the ravings of a crazy man. Escaped inmate, box of charred bones, a man claiming to be the very much alive and well victim, and everyone involved confused about just who was who and what was what and couldn't the whole mess be resolved real, real, real fast just by asking Tiller Ruminer, hey girl, this guy who claims to be your fiancé, the one you claim was murdered right in front of you, I bet you take a look and tell us what and who you see.

But first, let's let Mrs. Lily Baker lay her eyes on the man. Mrs. Baker was the mother of asylum inmate Marion Franklin Rogers. She'd been summoned to Mountain View to see if she could identify the man as her son. Baker allowed as to how she hadn't seen Marion since Christmas of the preceding year but a mother would know her boy anywhere.

And sure enough, Mrs. Baker was reunited with her son. She told the sheriff that the man in front of him was Marion Franklin Rogers, age 33, not 23, father and husband, though she did say that he and his wife had been separated for at least five years. As to whether or not her boy was the Connie Franklin in question, Mrs. Baker couldn't say.

But now finally, one part of the mystery was solved. For what it's worth, mother and son were overjoyed to be reunited. I ain't ashamed to say that I rushed to my mama's embrace. There was never any real indication given as to what bedeviled the man's mind to the point where he found himself incarcerated at the State Hospital for Nervous Diseases.

But remember the letter described by hospital officials as the ravings of a crazy man? I wrote it. That's the truth. But I was never in that hospital and I ain't going back there. Hmm. The prosecutor had a dilemma. If the Connie Franklin standing in front of him really was Marion Franklin Rogers, and now there seemed to be no denying that, then who was the Connie Franklin butchered and burned in the woods of St. James?

On December 8th, Connie Franklin was led into the packed courtroom. In that crowd, Tiller Ruminer. Tiller Ruminer, 16, Franklin's former sweetheart late yesterday, almost burst into tears as the youth picked her out of the crowd and implored her to say he was Franklin. Tiller, it's me. You know it is, Tiller. Say so. Come on, Tiller, you know I'm your Connie.

Don't you remember the songs I used to sing to you? The girl wept. Through her sobs, she said, Sing the Lonesome Pine. In the blue rich mountains of Virginia On the trail of the Lonesome Pine In the pale moonshine Our hearts entwine Where you carved your name And I carved mine If it's Connie, he's changed some. Tiller's father stood up and announced that he wanted to hear Connie Franklin play Turkey in the Straw on harmonica.

A harmonica was fetched, and Franklin commenced the playing it. Turkey in the Straw on harmonica. Charlie Ruminer listened intently, but refused to say whether or not the man in front of him was his daughter's suitor. The trial was more of a circus by the minute. Deputy Prosecuting Attorney W. M. Thompson, who questioned Franklin at length, and was also present when he met Tiller and her father, said the prosecution was not entirely satisfied as to the identity of the youth, and because of the unusual legal phase of the case, would proceed with the prosecution, leaving the jury to decide whether the youth was Connie Franklin.

All righty then, four men facing the death penalty for the murder of another man who may or may not still be alive, and the whole thing is up to the jury. That's an awfully heavy burden to place on a jury, and the kind of thing that would never happen today. Well, probably wouldn't happen today. Who even knows anymore?

And here's another bizarre twist. Franklin was kept in the custody of the father of one of his accused murderers. And then on December 18th, Connie Franklin himself took the stand. The man who says he is Connie Franklin went on the witness stand and testified that he's the same person whom four men, now on trial, are charged with torturing and burning to death.

The witness said his real name was Marion Franklin Rogers, but in recent years he used the name Connie Franklin. He said he was a patient in the State Hospital for Nervous Diseases and escaped in 1927. What in the hell is going on here? Three eyewitnesses declared they'd seen Franklin's body mutilated and burned. On the stand, Franklin admitted that he had told conflicting stories since he'd arrived back in Mountain View to testify for the defense.

I didn't want the whole world to know who I was and that I'd been in the insane asylum. Franklin also admitted that he was a married man, separated but not divorced. When asked why, if that was the case, did he intend to marry Tiller Ruminer on the night of his so-called murder? How do you know I was aiming to marry her?

Was you there? And this, girls, is why we don't tangle in our teen years with men twice our age. Tiller was no match for a man like Connie Franklin. She was just a little diversion, a plaything he tossed when he grew tired of it. A fierce electrical storm roared outside as each of the four defendants took the stand. The courtroom was poorly lit and the periodic flashes of lightning cast an eerie blue light on the faces of the spectators all watching intently.

And then Connie Franklin took the stand. Dressed in yellow brogands, blue socks, a soiled white shirt and two coats, he was in serious need of a haircut and a shave. For two hours he faced questions and a withering cross-examination. He admitted to the prosecutor that the story he told now, under oath, was not exactly the same story he told when he arrived in Mountain View ten days ago in hopes of clearing the four men charged with his murder.

Asked to recount the events of that March night, he pointed at the defendants and said, Me and these fellas started out that morning. I was riding an old mule, a bareback, and they wouldn't let me carry the liquor. That night, me and Tiller was at Herman's with his boy. I knew we wasn't gonna get married. They all went to bed and told us to get along to bed.

Tiller said no. She'd sit up. The next morning, Tiller told me she was through with me. And I said that I guess I was too. And I tried to borrow a dollar off Herman and couldn't. So I went off. And as far as being beaten to death and then burned on March 9th, 1929? Well, I don't feel like it. And I reckon I don't look like it.

Connie Franklin's testimony was matched by three of the men charged with murdering him. The fourth, Joe White, testified he not even left his house the night of March 9th. Meanwhile, outside, a blizzard raged. And inside the poorly insulated, dimly lit courtroom, spectators, juries, and attorneys all shivered despite wearing heavy overcoats.

To anyone not from these mountains, the trial lacked much. No one is called by their family names as their first names are known to all. They are simply Bill or Jay, and that is enough. People in this country live just a little ways from Dry Creek or over on the branch. And to one who doesn't know, the roots are hardly traceable.

Another striking fact was that while all the witnesses talked freely of the alleged murder, even the defendants, the source of the liquor on which they staged their party was never known. That's prohibition for you. Murder was one thing, but ratting out the local bootlegger? No way. The state star witness finally took the stand.

Tiller Ruminer, a thick-legged young mountain girl with rocks smeared thickly on her cheeks, wearing a borrowed dress, a red hat, wrinkled tan stockings, and muddy high-heeled shoes, was called to the stand today. She slurred her R's and spoke in incomplete sentences. She is 16 years old and has worked throughout the St. James neighborhood as a field hand, cotton chopper, and maid of all work.

Twenty-five witnesses testified that Connie Franklin was, in fact, the Connie Franklin who was supposedly murdered. Fifteen other witnesses said, no, no, this Connie Franklin is an imposter. Tiller Ruminer agreed with them and held firm that the man, whoever he was, was lying. That ain't him. That fella's too tall, hair too dark, and his nose is too big.

His shoulders are bigger and his weight is greater. The Wobegon Mountain Girl, as the out-of-town reporters described her, held firm despite aggressive questioning from both sides. The man in this courtroom claiming to be Connie Franklin simply was not the man she'd left out with that night to get a marriage license. And though it was true that she hadn't actually seen the murder with her own eyes, she heard it, she also testified that the defendants had directly threatened her.

I went back later and saw Connie lying in the road. He was dead. The men had left. I was too scared to go home. I went to the house of Herman Greenway. Directly, Greenway and Hester came home. I was sitting in a chair in front of the fire. They told me they'd killed Connie and showed me the brass nuts. They said if I ever told, they'd kill me too.

Every minute of this trial was already bizarre. And then came the kind of bombshell reveal you expect to see in a movie, not in real life. The defense called Sheriff Sam Johnson to the stand. Johnson was questioned about bones and teeth he'd found in an ash pile where the alleged murder had taken place. Defense attorney Ben Williamson then called a local dentist to the stand, Dr. A. Matthews.

Williamson picked out some of the teeth from the pile and handed them to the dentist, asking if he'd examined these teeth taken from where Connie Franklin's body had allegedly been burned. The dentist said that he had. Are they human teeth, asked Williamson. The dentist answered, they are not. They are dog teeth. Uproar!

Was it a fatal blow to the state's case? Worse even than having the murder victim insisting he hadn't been murdered at all? Pity poor Judge Bone. He was presiding over a trial with nothing but conflicting evidence. The victim insisting he hadn't been murdered. The fiancee insisting that the man calling himself Connie Franklin was lying.

Two other eyewitnesses swearing they'd seen the body. A box of charred bones that was missing a skull and a handful of charred teeth that turned out to be dog teeth. And the four defendants adamant that none of it had ever happened. Snow was drifting in piles against the windows of the courtroom. Flurries blowing in through every crack.

The overcrowded room was miserably uncomfortable as Judge Bone instructed the jury. Their first task was to determine the identity of the Connie Franklin in the courtroom. If they were unsatisfied as to that, they had no choice but to acquit or... You may find any or all the defendants guilty of first or second degree murder.

You may return a verdict of first degree murder without recommendation, in which case the state would fix the penalty at death or, quote, recommend life imprisonment. Now there's a blizzard coming down and we want to get through this before we're all snowed in. The jury deliberated and deliberated and deliberated for 13 hours.

The verdict? We're hung six and six, reported the jury foreman. We just can't agree. Surely 12 such intelligent men as you can reach some verdict. This case has already cost the county $3,000 and I do not propose any more money shall be spent. Back the jury went. It wasn't until 5 p.m. on December 19th that they filed back into the courtroom where about 50 spectators were waiting huddled around two wood-burning stoves.

Their verdict? Connie Franklin was who he claimed to be and all four defendants were free to go. Judge Bone dismissed the jury and closed this peculiar chapter in Arkansas legal history by saying, I ask each of you and all of you to let these bitter feelings now be forgotten. It was a nice thought, Your Honor, but bitter feelings tend to be the feelings that folks remember best.

So what happened next for Connie Franklin? Exactly the same thing that happens today when fame strikes a person like lightning and turns them famous or infamous, if even for a moment. Show business came calling. Connie's first stop was a free stay at the Majestic Hotel in Hot Springs, Arkansas. And then... Connie will do one thing while here, which he has probably never dreamed he would ever do.

That is, broadcast over a radio station. KGHT. Franklin will broadcast the story of his experiences in connection with his supposed murder. It will no doubt be Connie's first glimpse of a radio broadcasting station and will probably be a revelation for him. Hollywood wasn't far behind. Two men in a Cadillac car which bore a California state and Hollywood city license asked Officer Joe Scott to give them the shortest route to Mountain View, where they said they intended interesting Connie Franklin in a moving picture contract.

And public opinion? We fear some of our own people are disappointed because the case turned out like it has. And nobody's to die for murdering Connie Franklin when he is, to all appearances, alive. And nobody is killed. They call Connie Franklin the Arkansas Ghost. It's a case that confounded a community then and haunts it even now.

So many questions left unanswered. So many loose ends left forever untied. And the people of this tiny spot in the Ozark Mountains still smarting over the way they were portrayed by the national press. As for Connie Franklin, nothing much came of his radio debut or that fancy Hollywood contract. He disappeared again and stayed gone for more than 40 years.

Folks tell of a shriveled old man who appeared in Mountain View one day in the 1970s. They say that old codger could play a mean harmonica. They say it was the Arkansas Ghost himself. Come around again. Oh June, like the mountains are blue like the pines I am lonesome for you In the blueridge mountains a Virginia On the trail of the lonesome pine Next time on True, Weird Stuff. You've heard about it your whole life.

The Doomsday Clock. Whether it's 10 minutes to midnight or one minute to midnight. Who decides? And who even invented this clock that counts down the seconds to humanity's annihilation? Find out if time's up on the next True, Weird Stuff. Special thanks to our voice talents on this episode. Bridget Goolsby, Zane Nash, Don Morgan, Kary "Doc" Bowser, Kevin Nash, and Lamar Richardson.

Max. Yeah. I know that you're going to say, but what's the truth? And how wild is it that we don't even know? We do not know what the truth is. Somebody was murdered that night in the woods. There were eyewitnesses. Tiller only heard the crime, but we have two other. We have Chauncey and Harold who watched the crime unfold and were threatened afterward by the Night Riders. If it wasn't Connie Franklin, and it clearly wasn't, who died that night in the woods? And clearly there will never be justice.

What was your take? Wow, there's so many parts to this. I mean, I find it difficult to believe. I wonder whether Tiller Ruminer, when she said that man is not Connie Franklin, was indeed telling the truth. And the other part of this is she heard the crime. Some other people saw the crime, right? Right. Yeah, she was an ear witness and then we had two eyewitnesses. Was there another Connie Franklin? Is the question. This is such a mystery. So is there somebody else who was calling themselves Connie Franklin? I was trying to figure this out as we went along. You know, when a little behind the scenes, when we do these, the first time I hear the story is when you, when we record your narration parts.

Yeah. So I'm taking notes as I go along and I am so confused. So here's where we, so here's, this one is such a tangle. The Marion Franklin Rogers who escaped from the Hospital for Nervous Diseases was identified by his own mother as Marion Franklin Rogers. Right. She came to Mountain View and said, that's my son. He's 10 years older than he's pretending to be. He's got a wife and kids. They've been apart for five years. So she, that was like the end of the mystery about is Connie Franklin the same as Marion Franklin Rogers? Okay.

So, I mean, if his own mother doesn't know him, right? You kind of have to take that to the bank. For me, this story pivots on Tiller Ruminer who, depending on who was doing the describing, was everything from a wild beauty of the hills to a dull-witted, one of these newspapers called her thick-legged mountain girl. With rots smeared thickly on her cheeks, wearing a borrowed dress, a red hat, wrinkled tan stockings, and muddy high-heeled shoes. Oh my God, meow!

Right? So terrible. So either someone is gravely mistaken or many someones are lying and somehow managed to not break ranks. So this kind of pivots on Tiller Ruminer because the guy in Mountain View is identified by the mother as Marion Franklin Rogers. Okay. Connie Franklin himself admits that he wrote the letter because he didn't want anybody to know that he'd been locked up in the asylum. Right. So now, so that seems like even Connie Franklin is saying he's Marion Franklin Rogers. Yeah. So who was Tiller Ruminer? Who was she having a romance with? And there were so many circus moments in the If I had known Connie Franklin's story, I would have had an easier time with If the Glove Fits, You Must Acquit. Because this was a circus. Sherry, I thought when you started this, this would be a story that at the end, I went, I can't wait to find out. Because when it started, I went, I can't find to wait to find out how this all ends. And the fact is, we don't know. We don't. We don't know. No, we don't know. So there were a couple of there are a couple of theories. Theory one. So Connie Franklin, if you if you listen to his testimony, and he came back to Mountain View, because his buddies were charged with his murder, and he didn't want them to go down for a death penalty case. So the one theory goes is that Connie Franklin and these guys, they were out drinking, they were carousing, something happened, maybe a brawl that was misinterpreted by Tiller and the two men who were in the woods also that night. And that no human being was actually murdered at all. And the reason that the bones and teeth that they found at the crime scene were not human is because no human had actually been killed. And so the whole thing was a giant, overblown misunderstanding. And that and it's something we know now and you know, modern criminology is that eyewitnesses are extremely unreliable. Yeah, they're very unreliable at night, been drinking. We're drinking, it's night. Now we've been threatened. And also you have to remember prohibition. So the night riders in the woods that night, that may have been a bootlegging operation. And a night broke out, nobody died, but it looked so much worse than it was. And it was an easy out for Connie Franklin, because Tiller had already told him that she had changed her mind and didn't want to get married. So he just, by his own testimony, skipped town. He just went on. Well, and he did that once before. So it's not terribly hard to believe. And this is, you know, before there was I mean, you have to remember in Mountain View, Arkansas, they didn't have electricity, they didn't have telephones. Nobody had a newsfeed. Were you not surprised? Yeah, that they didn't even have telegraph there. I mean, it was 1929. These were all things that were pretty common through most of the United States, right?

Yes, but this wasn't like a big town like Little Rock or even a big little town like Fort Smith. This was a smudge in the road, deep in the mountains. This is a rural isolated place. Can we get back to that evidence? So what you're saying is you don't think it was planted. You don't think somebody put some stuff there and said, well, the story has been told we need to have something so it looks real. I guess I don't give these gentlemen that much credit. I mean, being that the dentist ended up saying, yeah, these are dog teeth, you know.

So that would lead you to believe that something may have been planted or was that just stuff that was there from a deceased dog? There were some other, there were like some deer bones in the area. So here's the thing. Today, the pace of justice is very slow. It can be glacially slow sometimes, right? You're charged with a crime and it can be years before you're brought to trial. I mean, a case that we refer to often on this show is the Brian Koburger case and those murders of university students in Idaho. You know, it takes a long time now to bring a case to trial. But back then, I mean, we've kind of laughed about this because if you don't laugh, you'll lose your mind. It's dark. We've kind of laughed about how the gun gets fired, the body hits the street, the trial is in three days, execution that afternoon, right? Everything was so fast back then. One of the interesting things about this case for me, like if I were in law school studying this, I would be looking at all the ways that nothing was done correctly.

The evidence was not vetted before walking it into the courtroom because it shouldn't have been a revelation that those were dog's teeth. Everybody involved should have known that, right? They didn't do like what we call discovery now, where both sides look at the evidence and you interview witnesses and you build your case. It just nothing, nothing worked like that. They were so half-assed.

And then you have this very unusual circumstance where the judge basically tells the grand jury, you're going to have to decide if this is Connie Franklin or not because we have no other way of proving it, which was a huge thing to place on the grand jury. You know, this was before DNA and all that sort of stuff. Yeah, so there's that. And then there are these like showboat ridiculous moments where we've got this 16-year-old sobbing on the stand, sing Lonesome Pine, which was a huge hit at the time. Oh my God, you couldn't walk 10 feet near a radio or a music hall without hearing that song.

Huge song. And now we've got the alleged murder victim himself being instructed to stand up and sing acapella in court, being instructed to play the harmonica in court to see if it matches the witness's memory. I want you to imagine the outrage if that happened today in a murder trial. Oh, it's crazy. It is. Also, you know, the more things change, the more they stay the same. For people who are from certain parts of the country, Arkansas is still flyover territory, and they still have the same sort of looking down their nose at people who grow up in the country and people being, you know, hurt and offended by the way they've been portrayed. That hasn't changed, you know, I mean, all these years later.

This case was such a grievous insult to the people of Arkansas. There are people generations later that are still pissed off and you can understand why. So like when war correspondent Harry Brundidge was parachuted in, I mean, this was like, you know, one of those Hemingway kind of guys, War is Swell kind of guys. And then, you know, he switched it up and was the Hollywood beat reporter when they sent him out to Arkansas.

Nobody had ever seen the likes of Harry Brundidge. He was so flamboyant, so over-the-top. They're staying at the, and it's almost painful, the cliches, the Dew Drop Inn is the hotel, right? I did not make this up, right? This is the name. So they're staying in this Dew Drop Inn. They've got no electricity, no running water.

Harry's been living in Beverly Hills, Max, in the Roaring 20s. I want you to imagine the switch up this was for him. He's swanning around the Dew Drop in his stripy silk pajamas, pouring liquor for everyone. Again, this is Prohibition. So, you know, they're just openly violating the liquor laws and getting drunk and singing and tearing up the place.

And then the next day, sending their stories back to their editors on the East and West Coast, basically telling tales about how the simple-minded mountain folk of Arkansas didn't even know when they'd been murdered or not. It was an absolute spectacle. When I think about the whole business with Connie and of course, you're saying that he was friends with these guys and decided that he wanted to try to help them.

So he didn't have a beef with them at all. Then there was no animosity of any kind there. He was working a few towns over and again, we have to remember it's so alien to us because we live in such a hyper-connected world. He's a few towns over, no phone, no TV, no news feed, no internet. He doesn't know what's happening in Mountain View.

Why would he? He's working as a farmhand all day out in the middle of Bufu. So when he gets wind that these men are being charged with his murder, he comes back to Mountain View and presents himself. The interesting thing is Connie keeps on being referred to as the youth. When we're going through this, I was a little confused because he's a 33 year old man.

He must have been an awfully youthful looking 33 year old man that he's passing himself off as 20 and he's being referred to as the youth. Yeah, he clearly was one of those people that didn't age, He part of it is like I think to myself, he told people he was 23 year old Connie Franklin and they saw no reason to disbelieve him.

Even if he looked a little older than that, maybe folks just took him at his word. You know, when you see pictures from people from this era, life was harder and they worked harder and they all looked older. They did all look older. So I guess I suppose that I can understand that. I suspect if I had Tiller, if we had a time machine and I put 16 year old Tiller Ruminer next to any random 16 year old girl you have handy.

I bet Tiller looks 10 years older, right? Just because of the hardships that people lived with. There are so few things. That's the reason why he's called the Arkansas ghost because you can't lay your finger on him. He slips away. With all of the testimony, including his own mother saying this is Marion Rogers. He can call himself Connie all day long.

This is who he is. It's even that is still kind of murky, isn't it? Yeah, I was very interesting about that Tiller Ruminer. I wanted to see how long did she live? She lived to the age of 79. So she died in 1991. Not all that long ago. No, and I often wonder if anybody came back to her and said, hey, you have anything more to say about this trial and this guy and all this stuff?

Well, here's what I have to say about Tiller. So when we entered Tiller's life, she's 16 and she's being romanced by this person who we now know was 33, right? Yeah, so she didn't have a ghost of a chance against that seduction. She's a simple, simple mountain girl. Never went to school. No experience of the world or men and here comes this guy.

So she was vulnerable, right? And young, but she was also the victim of a gang rape, which everybody tiptoed around and you'll notice that all of the denials of murder. Did you hear a single denial of that? No, he didn't. Those men were facing charges for statutory crimes, which is the polite way they said it back then.

Tiller was so traumatized. And I think the events of that night, I think when you are experiencing that level of violence, maybe, you know, maybe your perception of time or distance is distorted. I feel like mine would be, right? Yeah, and depending on who you believe, because this is one of those rare stories that really is just he said, she said piled on top of he said, she said, and no matter how far down you dig, you can't seem to land on a fact, right?

According to one source or another, Tiller may have been, you know, you heard the Night Riders characterized both Connie Franklin and Tiller as mentally defective. Yeah, Tiller may have had some sort of developmental or cognitive impairment that made her an unreliable witness in the town's eyes. Now, I don't know. I, you know, back then they would call people touched or defective or deficient.

And for all we knew, they were just bashful or eccentric. We don't know. I will tell you something interesting about her though. And that is she did get married and her name ended up being her last name was Britain. And she married a man who she is buried next to who she was married to to the end of his life. He was 28 years older than her.

He was born in 1884. She was born in 1912. Well, I'm going to take a wild swing for the fences and tell you that based on what I do know of Tiller older men had used her freely. Yeah, but I just don't know a nicer way to put it. Yeah, I imagine that was especially in circumstances like that where people are not worldly.

They don't have a chance to be because of the way circumstances are. I'm sure that that happens frequently and happened frequently with her at least happened two times. It seems when you read between the lines for Tiller. That she was not she was really victimized and brutalized but this of course is happening at a time where I mean people don't come forward now people are hesitant to press charges.

Now. This was at a time where a girl's life would just be ruined because she would be blamed for what happened to her which is also still true. Although we're a little bit less obvious about it as they were back then. Is it possible? There was so much trauma surrounding whatever did happen to her that perhaps that's that that colors how the story came out and to her everything.

She says is the absolute truth and that's why it came out the way that it did. That's what I thought and I thought what would it be like because you have to put yourself as best you can in Tiller's what they call the muddy high-heeled shoes and the borrowed dress. I don't know how the reporter would know it was a borrowed dress.

I just this was what the folks of Mountain View were an end of Arkansas. We're so offended by this every chance to take a cheap shot at these people for being poor or dirty or stupid or defective like that these these coastal papers did not miss an opportunity to take a swipe. And and this is why to this day. There's a festering pissed off in this about the Connie Franklin murder case, but I think you're right that with Tiller.

I think she was outmatched and overwhelmed every step of the way the entire trial was a circus Connie Franklin arriving back in town alive and well, I mean could please put yourself in her shoes for a second. She's convinced. He's been dead and his body's been burned in a bonfire and here he comes and he's like Tiller.

Don't you I'm your Connie. Don't you know me and she's on the stand and there's all this pressure and I don't know who did what to who I but I think that Tiller got the rawest of deals here. I can't tell you this much. I can see why it made for a great story at that time. And I'm sure that all the wire services and everything else that were around the way they they transmitted news back in 1929.

I'm sure that this ended up being a story that was read far and wide and because how many times you have a murder trial the victim shows up at the trial and all of the little things that the judge here, I feel sorry for Judge Bone, although I love his name. If you're going to be a judge, you should be Judge Bone if it's available.

Some things were allowed to happen in that uninsulated unheated courtroom that was illuminated by like three bare light bulbs strung across the ceiling. It was unpleasant. It was cold and drafty and crowded and a free-for-all just an absolute free-for-all. And to this day, we don't have any idea who was murdered. If anyone was murdered that night in the woods, did you catch how they didn't really have a jail cell in Mountain View?

So one of the fathers of one of the accused murderers offered to put Connie Franklin up at his place. Imagine that being allowed today. Oh, if you can if you can that would be like a mistrial, but the judge had no he really had no choice but to tell the jury because you know, you're going to have to figure out who this guy is and then figure the rest of this stuff out.

I don't think there's anything else that he could have done. I mean, I think that he was put into the position where he said, all right, you're the jury. I don't know you figure it out. The two things that because if it wasn't for the two eyewitnesses, I would I would go with this as a theory. Nobody died that night in the woods.

It was all a terrible misunderstanding and the only victim of any crime was 16-year-old Tiller Ruminer who was raped by multiple night riders. I believe that that of anything any part of this that I believe more than anything. Yeah, I don't think I think there is absolutely truth, but that is not something especially back then that a woman testified to easily knowing the price that you would pay because you would be you would be the pariah more than the men or men who assaulted you and I do believe that happened the fear of nobody would want me then after that.

Yeah, they destroyed your room and Max go ahead. We have to I would we have to I will that's the thing I want to talk about those eyewitnesses. We don't know how reliable they are. Okay. So one of them is was somebody who I guess the description was deaf and mute. So I'm not sure how this person communicated but I'm wondering whether there could be some misunderstanding about what this person saw and then the other person.

We don't see we don't what we don't know is we don't know how reliable they were, you know, you kind of have they always vet witnesses, you know when you it's always interesting to watch any anytime you see a courtroom drama and I'm sure that this is based in some fact you go to a witness you go. All right. I this is what I saw.

I saw this and then they pick they go but what about this and what about that and all of a sudden their story looks like it doesn't hold water and maybe under more scrutiny of today's judicial system. Those things wouldn't have held any water. I mean the guy who was deaf and mute did he I guess he didn't testify at the trial.

He did and they use the series of they would ask him a question and he would tap his fingers for yes or no. I see, you know again like in today's judicial system. You I'm not saying I'm not saying because of his impairment that he's not reliable. What I'm saying is there's there's greater chance for misunderstanding given the technology of the day.

Here's where I get stuck. So that man and then there's the other guy Chauncey they neither was aware of the other in the woods that night. They weren't together. So they couldn't talk about what they'd seen with each other because neither of them knew the other was there you following right right both were threatened separately by the Night Riders with violence if they spoke and it's just so hard for us living in the modern world to understand what a real threat that vigilante justice was.

I mean, it was so real. So people were terrified was the threat against them because of what happened with this murder or because they were afraid of some sort of moonshining thing being discovered. Well that I kept telling myself like they were they were bootleggers and they didn't want because I mean that that was like, you know murders seemingly wasn't as awful a thing to be accused of as being a moonshiner or bootlegger.

But the thing that stops me there is that both of those men separately with no knowledge of each other described seeing a man beaten. They there was some somebody took a whooping that night in the Did that person end up murdered? I don't know but but unless those two men for whatever reason are just lying through their teeth.

It sure sounds like somebody got beaten up. Yeah, I guess when Sean sees testimony he kind of acted like that. He did he whatever he witnessed it looked like it wasn't just that the guy was beaten but that he died. I mean that's based on his testimony. So and the consistency of the beating the death the body into the fire.

I mean all of our witnesses without any knowledge of each other tell some version that lines up with that which makes you wonder and this was a theory or a possibility that there was a man killed that night in the woods. That wasn't Connie Franklin aka Mary and Rogers Franklin. It was somebody else now who who knows people to go missing every single day and we often never find them right and back then when we didn't have any of the criminal forensics that we had now was even harder to find them.

So no ring doorbell cameras did the Night Riders commit murder that night and it just wasn't Connie Franklin that feels likely to me especially since Connie let's be so real was kind of one of them. He wasn't a Knight Rider, but these were his buddies. He was hanging out in their houses and spending time with Tiller and so the witnesses were threatened correct.

The two men were threatened. Yes, and so was Tiller. Yeah. So if they were yeah, okay. Yeah, they committed a murder. They murdered Sunday did indeed murder somebody. They murdered somebody else that's somebody died somebody died but this whole business of her not recognizing Connie in court and stuff that there's so many layers to this.

Yeah. I mean I as I'm sitting here I go, but what was that about what and that's exactly because the mother is like that man who calls himself Connie. That's my boy and the fiance is like if that's him he's changed. So what in the world do you see why this has been such an enduring mystery? So is it possible that that was indeed the Connie Franklin that she had hooked up with?

I don't know or was engaged or whatever. Is it possible that the enough time had lapsed in between she didn't know him that long right that she had romanticized what he looked like and who he was and by the time she saw him again, whatever her romantic idea was in her head didn't match what he looked like when he came to court that this is the most feasible to me.

So they met and three months later. They courted for three months and they were planning marriage and then Connie was killed in March of night allegedly in March of 1929 and then didn't appear back in town until December of that same year to show up at his murder trial. I think when we're talking about we've got a young woman who has been severely traumatized who if you want to believe some of the things that were said about her may not have been what's the way to say it Max?

She may have had some stuff going on. I don't know what that made her less reliable. Um, yeah, like she may just what I don't even know what the diagnosis might be. But yeah, you could and by the way, you've believed for months now, you've believed for nine months that your fiance had been brutally murdered while you were being sexually assaulted.

Could it be that that trauma right there all by itself is enough for you to not know what's up or down when you're confronted with that same man in the courtroom? I think any psychiatrist would tell you. Yeah, like you put yourself in those shoes and you go. No, I would know my boyfriend or my fiance. No, no, I wouldn't know that that was him.

But but this you know, we're not we're not living in an isolated community. We haven't had tillers experiences. We don't even really understand tiller because everything we know about tiller is through the lens of some pretty intense judgment on her appearance when they called her thick-legged. Like, oh my God, I don't know who that seems unnecessary wrote that but that was definitely unnecessarily mean.

Yeah. Yeah, you jerk offs. So I mean, what do we really know of this person except some hateful and unkind things that have been said. They're seeing that about a child. He was writing all these unkind things about a child. Let's not forget. I'm telling you the people of the Ozark community in that part of Arkansas. They are not wrong to feel the way they felt and still feel today.

They were painted as a bunch of half-wit Hill folk fun fun fact really are, you know, the TV show the Beverly Hillbillies. Well, supposedly they came from the Ozark Mountains. So there you go. I'll be ding ding. Yeah, really helping helping with one. That cliche come from really helping with this perception. Am I the way that that like I was like this has to have an ending.

There's no way this is so open-ended. There's no way they're not sure. Well, they're not sure they're not they're not they're not now. What what do you make of I do think that the old man who wandered back into Mountain View at the end of his life saying he was Connie Franklin and I think that was I think that was the same Connie Franklin who showed up at his murder trial.

I do. Yeah. So he would have been yeah, he would have been he would have been an old man 1970s. Yeah, because he was yeah, so he would have been he was probably born like 1897 or something there about so yeah, okay. And let us never forget as far as his reliability goes as a storyteller or a witness and I this is going to sound hateful.

I don't mean it to this is a man that was locked up in an asylum. We don't know why well, we don't know why do we really his his some of his records that were sent from the asylum to Mountain View for the trial. Apparently he was given to massive outbursts and some, you so I was trying to armchair diagnose him and going maybe we have like there wasn't any sign of depression.

There was some mania, but I don't see anything that looks like, you know, like a depressed like a bipolar like a mood disorder, but there was he clearly he could like even back then though they would Chuck you into the asylum because they didn't like the look on your face. It was very it would be very unusual for a man to be penned up like that.

Well, you know without some behavior we have talked about this. I know on other episodes, but they used to sort of warehouse people who had all kinds of things going on people on the autism scale would get lumped in with people with substance abuse with people with you know, a bipolar disorder and that might have been what it was that was going on with him who knows but they all were sort of warehouse in the same place when they would go.

Well, we don't know what to do with you. Well, we'll just stick them all here. So and he couldn't get out which is why he escaped and why did he run away from his wife and five kids dude? Why does anybody I mean, that's like there are probably a million answers to that question. You know a man stepping out to get milk and not coming back.

It's not exactly a new story 33 years old go. I just was hoping to have a little bit of fun with the five kids later. I'm like, yeah, my brother you folks didn't folks weren't making the connection as to where babies were coming from maybe back then. I don't know but he had and before long before he showed up in Mountain View.

He had been estranged it had been years since he'd been in the same house as his wife. So this I've been thinking a lot. He was 28 years old and already had five children five kids to think about that. So something to really think about because we can now do like DNA tests and find out our family trees our ancestry and all that and people are very often shocked by what comes back when they do that and and something I think about a lot and it's really you see it in this case.

We don't know who we are because Connie Franklin Marion Franklin Rogers five children. They grew up without their father who are their descendants today and do they realize their connection to those descendants realize their connection to this story did Connie Franklin after this murder trial and he left Mountain View again not to return for decades.

Did he go on to be with another woman? Did he have more children? How about Tiller? How about someone like Tiller who's attacked in the woods? She didn't in this case get pregnant but she could have and then what right like we're surprised when we open up those 23 and me or Ancestry Reports and discover that I didn't know I had a cousin in Indiana.

Yeah, but you don't know a lot about your family tree because people are people and we're reckless and selfish and impulsive. And if this is not a story of reckless selfish impulsivity, what is it? Should this makes this story makes my head hurt because there's so many twists and turns and layers to this but I know you know no ending no resolution resolution.

No Robert stack comes on. It's unsolved. It is it kind of is so all we know all we know for sure is that the man calling himself Connie Franklin was not murdered in the woods in Arkansas in March 1929. That's it. That is the only thing we know for sure. We think somebody else may have been because why would those witnesses at risk of their own lives?

They were under threat by the Night Riders. Why would they make up a story that's going to get them killed right? So we have two witnesses who were sober incredible who say that they saw a murder. So who was the victim and was it just coincidence that we had deer bones and dog teeth in a fire pit? I think there's probably a whole bunch of this story that never made its way into a newspaper or a courtroom.

And and that died with the people who knew the truth because if you think so those men that were accused that the accused killers were also accused of being Night Riders and it was honestly worse to be found guilty being a Knight Rider. I think them being found guilty of being a murderer like they were not playing when it came to vigilante justice in the day.

Um, though those men if they were what they were accused of being vigilante Night Riders. You think they were going to talk do you think any each one of them had so much on the other that they were locked in a in that circle of complicity. They were going to take that to the grave and I think they did. I think they did.

Yeah, I think that they did. So if you were to visit the town of Mountain View, Arkansas, I'm going to stay at the do drop in I can tell you that. Well, I actually encourage you they have a festival there every year with music and it's like a celebration of the folkways of the region. I bet if you went to the courthouse, there'd be a little sign commemorating Associated Press installing the very first Mountain View and maybe even a mention of the murder of the famous murder trial where the victim showed up to testify.

I bet there's some historical plaque there that would show you that and it's just one of those things, you know, some places spark up a legend that no one can ever prove that just makes a great story and this might be one of those places. My grandfather was a telegraph operator and he may have been a part of the chain of telling this story.

He may have been because this was huge everywhere in the United States. This was a big story because no matter where you were living, it was lurid and sensational. If you were reading this over breakfast in Chicago, you could feel good about being a city slicker. Yeah, if you were reading this over breakfast in a small farming community in Oklahoma, you could feel very good about living among decent people.

Like this was a way and the way that the coverage of this case was written. It was so judgmental. It's so over-the-top judgmental. This was a feel-good story for everybody outside of Mountain View. I think we have an idealized idea of what journalism was back in the day and one of the things about doing this podcast with you, when you have some of these newspaper accounts, I'm like, well, this person certainly seems to have an opinion about things and it's really mean-spirited.

One of the things like people as Americans, one of our favorite pastimes is nostalgia. We talk about this on the show. We think that the people of the past were better. They were harder working and they were more virtuous and they were more moral. They were humble and went to church on Sunday and they took care of their neighbors.

That is just bullshit right there. That is not true at all. The people of the past were just like the people of the present minus, you know, iPhones and Botox because people are people and this idea that there's a more wholesome America that we can somehow return to when the truth is that the people of the past did not have the understanding that we do now of how much is not a person's fault.

Like you would not dream of talking about Tiller Ruminer today the way they talked about her back then. Oh, you would look you would look at her and you'd understand this 16 year old has not had the benefit of going to school. She's living in extreme poverty in isolation. She's been the victim of a monstrous crime. That's what you would look at her and see you wouldn't go.

Well, here's a thick-legged thing in a borrowed dress and stupid look on her face, which is what they got. But you know, there are people and if this is you come close and let me hold your hand. So I'm going to be gentle when I say this to you. There are people who mistake common decency for political correctness. If I refrain from calling your mama a cross-eyed whore, it's not because I'm being PC.

It's because I'm looking at your cross-eyed whore of a mama and thinking it wouldn't be nice to point it out. Do you understand what I'm saying? You're Max. Yeah to be a decent person. Sometimes it's not being politically correct to not be an asshole. Sometimes it's just trying you trying to be a decent person. So we do have a bit of a movement afoot right now to take away the woke rules that prevent people from telling it like it is but the problem with that and Americans have forgotten this is when someone tells when you tell someone how it is.

Hey, not for nothing James, but your mom is a cross-eyed hooker. He is likely to come back and share with you some unfiltered opinions about you and in the Wild West guns would be drawn right these or a duel would be challenged. We we have gotten confused about the difference between common decency and political correctness.

It is okay to not just describe someone in any nasty way that you feel is appropriate based on your personal perceptions and judgments. We are confused by that and in the case of the Connie Franklin Tire and specifically Tiller Ruminer, although the entire state of Arkansas got tagged with this nastiness. The feeling was well, you know, I'm a big city reporter from New York or Los Angeles and these people are slow and stupid and I'm going to I'm going to cause it like I sees it and we see that all the time in the press of that era all the time astonishingly.

It's not it's not okay. You are not more freely expressing yourself. You're just being a dick and you're being rude and you're being unkind when you whether or not Tiller and the thing is Tiller wasn't on trial here. Tiller was the victim of a crime and the victim of some sort of like to really duplicitous ruse. And yet she was the victim of being just you know, insulted.

Exactly. This ain't a woman's world. So the fact that she went on to marry and live a long and let's hope peaceful life. However, she determined that let's hope that Tiller had some joy and some happiness after this. Yeah, because this was this was just crazy. This was a girl that got seduced and done dirty and then Assaulted and then humiliated and then you know was a laughing stock for the nation as they she was kind of like the caricature of a hillbilly girl.

You know low intelligence questionable morals all of it. They painted her like some teenage Mammy Yoakum. And I'll remind you she was the victim. She wasn't on she wasn't one of the right accused. So yeah. So I apologize that we cannot tell you what really happened that night in the woods because anybody who knew what really happened that night in the woods died with it and anybody they told died with it to for fear.

I guess that the night Riders would come for them. So there you go. And don't forget that in that area is where Jed discovered oil and became a millionaire and said California was a place he had to be. No, I believe some folks called it black gold or Texas T. Oh my gosh apologies to the entire state of Arkansas who it's a beautiful if you've not had the chance to travel much through Arkansas.

There's so much natural beauty and there's a lot of wild badass American cultural history in Arkansas to this is not our first visit to Arkansas. We've spent some time in Fort Smith with Bonnie and Clyde right on an earlier episode called what we call that one. The Red Red Crown Inn. Yes, the Red Crown Inn. If you're a Bonnie and Clyde aficionado, it's a really great and not very well-known story about Bonnie and Clyde at all.

They spent a lot of time in Arkansas Arkansas was a kind of pivotal in you know, the whole Prohibition situation to there was a lot of bootlegging and because if you look at where it in the country, you know, it was a there was a lot of movement coming through and Connie Franklin the Arkansas ghost the man who showed up to testify at his own murder trial.

It's looking like he died of old age and not in the woods room in her. Yeah, so yeah, so thank you for joining us for this one next week. We're going to pay a visit to the Doomsday Clock. Do you remember like do you remember the first time you heard of the Doomsday Clock or has it just always been a feature of your life?

It's always been a feature of my life. I feel like it's always been there and people have talked about it and it's so depressing. I just like I But here's the thing it is. It's same. I like I don't remember a time when I didn't hear the phrase Doomsday Clock and I got to wondering about it. Like well, well, I am fascinated to know I am fascinated to Yeah, like I got to thinking like what is it?

Was it ever like a real clock like a real mechanical device and who invented it and who gets to decide when and how the hands of the clock change? What are the things that make the clock move closer to midnight or further back and the answers blew my mind and I think you're going to be really surprised to. Well, I can't wait for it when we settle down with the Doomsday Clock on the next true weird stuff.

And if you voted for our show for the 2025 Webby's People's Voice Award, we sure do. Thank you for that. It was so thrilling to be nominated. I think that we're going to be rocking that nomination excitement until the day we die. Yes, like we'll be if we if we lived another like we could be 100 years old and sitting on a porch somewhere and I'm going to kick Max and say remember that time we got nominated for a Webby and he's going to respond to go.

You can't find your hubby. No. No, Max, a Webby. We got nominated for a Webby and Max will say where is he a Webby Max a Webby and we'll be old and once we both like get those trains connecting. We'll be delighted to for that nomination. So thank you and thank you for voting as of right as of us doing this. We don't know what's happened with it.

So yeah. Yeah, but we we suspect what's going to happen and we're just delighted to be nominated. We'll see you on the next true weird stuff. Thank you so much for being a listener. You are the people were making it for and if you listen to us on Apple podcast hit the plus button in the top right corner and now it helps an independent podcast like ours to get discovered and we really appreciate it.

If you subscribe rate and review true weird stuff hit our website true weird stuff.com for show notes and photos and videos when we have it and bonus content everything true weird is waiting for you at true weird stuff.com and follow true weird stuff on Instagram true weird stuff is a Now! Media production. Our executive producer is Anthony Garcia.

The show is written and hosted by me Sheri Lynch along with my equally weird director. Max Newton are equally odd producer is Kary Bowser additional production by the mysterious Stephen Call our digital witch and social media cult leader is Heather Furr original graphics by Kevin Nash original artworks by Olivia Axland true weird original music composed and performed by Jack Griffin and Zane Nash copyright 2025 Now! Media all rights reserved all wrongs remembered.